Bill Nye's Answer to the Fermi Paradox

[LongTomH]

Named for its originator, the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, the Fermi Paradox asks the question, "if chances are that we're not alone in the universe, how come we haven't heard from any of the other alien civilizations?"

According to Bill Nye, he and the Planetary Society hold the opinion that we probably haven't been listening hard enough. The Science Guy goes on to explain how NASA is boosting efforts at intergalactic communication.

Note that Bill doesn't seem to subscribe to the idea of a 'Great Filter' that limits the lifetime of an intelligent species, or makes its emergence unlikely in the first place.

[LiberalArkie]

1. All our communications methods consist of using the electromagnetic spectrum.

What if civilizations in space have used lets say telepathy instead. We could not hear them and they could not hear us..

[PJMcK]

2. Telepathy?!

Let's stay scientific. Perhaps the aliens use higher frequencies or lasers of other forms of light for communications. Or maybe they invented a different technology that humans have yet to uncover.

The universe is very big and very old. It could be that other civilizations are just too far away to be detected. Certainly, we would only be able to receive communications from a planet within the Milky Way. Any other galaxy is tremendously far, far away.

[LiberalArkie]

8. Sorry, out was the only thing that came to mind that fit "they might not use the same

spectrum as we do"

Maybe they discovered digital communications before we did and we can not decode it.

Any number of reasons why.

[PJMcK]

10. We're good!

I think the biggest problem is that the distances within our galaxy alone are so vast that radio waves, or other waves, get dissipated over such distances.

More importantly, the odds that our civilization would be scientifically aware at the same relative times as other species seem very remote.

Have a heart, LiberalArkie!

[LiberalArkie]

40. Thank you..

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

3. They also listen somewhere in the electromagnic spectrum

where we are not ourselves broadcasting. So Nye might be right that we should be looking at the visible spectrum. But if aliens are currently broadcasting that way, why have our TVs not already picked that up? There's clearly a technical issue I don't understand.

Although apparently it is a total myth that civilizations some light-years out could be just now capturing our old TV signals and be watching "I Love Lucy" or "Bonanza" or whatever. Even as far out as Mars those signals would be difficult to capture and read. Light years out? Essentially impossible, even if they knew exactly what needed to be done to turn them into something like the original picture and sound.

The other huge issue is, despite Bill Nye's belief to the contrary, is that any intelligent species is not going to last forever. It will evolve, build its civilization, and eventually go extinct.

Some people believe that any advanced technological civilization will inevitably destroy itself before it makes it to other stars.

But there are other problems that no one seems to address. What if a highly intelligent species simply does not become technological and try to leave its planet? What if it evolves, say, under ice such as Europa or under a planet covering dense cloud like Venus? What if their vision is such that they can't really see the stars in the night sky?

[SWBTATTReg]

5. Good points...also, what if they don't simply care about us? Possible. NT

[LiberalArkie]

9. Your digital TV can not pick up the old analog signals. Your digital TV would

not be able to picked up digital broadcasts if encoded differently.

[LongTomH]

12. I don't think it's inevitable that a technological civilization will destroy itself before .........

..........reaching the stars. Those that DO survive long-term, and by long-term I mean on a scale of millions of years, will almost certainly be the ones that do reach out into space. I heard that decades ago from Arthur C. Clarke; more recently, Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking have voiced the same opinion.

This quote from Randall Munroe has gone viral:



Maybe there's still hope for us; which is another reason to admire Elon Musk's work.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

16. But individual species simply don't last for millions of years.

One million years is about it. Evolution will not stop just because a species has reached some level of technology.

In fact, our species is probably evolving faster now than it used to. Perhaps the successor species to homo sapiens will continue to advance technology and reach out to the stars but I wouldn't count on it.

And simply evolving is not the same as destroying itself.

There's also the problem of interstellar distances. They are vaster than most people understand. Here's the best illustration I know:

Our galaxy, Milky Way, has about 300 billion stars. Andromeda has about a trillion. The two galaxies are on a collision course, will crash together in about four or five million years. I recently asked an astronomer I know just how many stars will actually collide with each other when that happens. His answer, "About ten." More will have gravitational affects on each other, but actually crashing together? 10 out of 1.3 trillion stars.

And interstellar distances are even vaster.

[LongTomH]

17. If we, as a species, continue to evolve, then it will be our evolutionary successors.

Some relevant quotes:

From Arthur C. Clark: "They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge … no Gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command … But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the Universe when it was young."

"If man survives for as long as the least successful of the dinosaurs, those creatures whom we often deride as nature's failures, then we may be certain of this: for all but a vanishingly brief instant near the dawn of history, the word 'ship' will mean spaceship.'

Frank. J. Tipler: "If the human species, or indeed any part of the biosphere, is to continue to survive, it must eventually leave the Earth and colonize space. For the simple fact of the matter is, the planet Earth is doomed… Let us follow many environmentalists and regard the Earth as Gaia, the mother of all life (which indeed she is). Gaia, like all mothers, is not immortal. She is going to die. But her line of descent might be immortal… . Gaia's children might never die out--provided they move into space. The Earth should be regarded as the womb of life, but one cannot remain in the womb forever."

Robert Shapiro, Planetary Dreams: "Earth has provided a stable platform for the evolution of life over 4 billion years. But that lease is limited; we know for sure that it will expire after a few billion more… . If we are wise, we will have furnished our new apartments long before that time."

Tom Wolfe: "The purpose of the space program is not to maintain superiority in space but to build a bridge to the stars before the sun dies. Homo loquaz (man speaking) or Homo sapiens (rational man) is the only thoughtful creature in the universe, so far as we know. If he doesn't build himself that bridge to escape across, all is lost."

Ray Bradbury: "We are beholden to give back to the Universe… . If we make landfall on another star system, we become immortal."

There are more such quotes here.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

20. Maybe. And maybe not.

To assume that the successor species to homo sapien will necessarily be smarter and better is just an assumption. Nothing more.

Our successor species might well be a whole lot less than we are.

Even the dinosaur species each only lasted about a million years, so Clarke isn't saying anything meaningful.

[Moid62]

24. But individual species simply don't last for millions of years.

Tell that to the alligators, 200 million years and still going strong. One thing to keep in mind about evolution, if a species is a "success" and there is a large stable population, it won't change much. At only 200 thousand years, the jury is still out on humans.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

25. And in those 200 million years what, exactly, have alligators accomplished?

Plus, I rather suspect that modern alligators are not the same species as those 200 million years ago. A quick on-line check into them suggests rather strongly that modern day alligators may not be. And even if they are the exact same species, they are an anomaly, not an example that most species last many millions of years.

[Moid62]

30. They are indeed an anomaly

My only point was that extinction within a couple of million years is not inevitable. Every now and then nature comes up with an "evolutionary success", that wins the lottery and is ideally suited to a stable environment or able to adapt to a reasonable range of change (a lot of variables there I know) and they hang around for a very long time.

I think that human civilization is becoming a victim of its own success and we are probably headed for a population crash within the next thousand years or so. Probably not an extinction level thing, but it will most likely cost us a lot of our technology. Humans have a wide range of survival modes we can fall back on, but most will not support the population and tech levels we have now.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

32. I think we're headed for a population crash much, much sooner.

The current population, some 7.6 billion people, is totally unsustainable. Even without climate change (or even if the climate change is not at all connected to man-made factors) there are too many people using too many natural resources. Already the scarcity of water in various places, the life-threatening pollution in cities in China and India, the possibility of famine of some sort of serious crop failures occur, all these make me very uneasy.

If we are very, very lucky, there will be a decline that is not a crash. But it's probably already too late for a crash not to happen somewhere down the road, whether sooner as I think, or later as you do.

[Sailor65x1]

26. Actually, almost everything we broadcast

Is in the electromagnetic spectrum, as is most of what we "Listen to."

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

29. Yes, but you have to tune in very specifically

to a particular frequency to understand what is broadcast.

[SeattleVet]

31. Not as simple as just tuning to the specific frequency, but to be able to decode the information.

Just tuning to an AM radio station's frequency using an FM receiver, or one that decodes digital data or some other mode of transmission will get you very little useful information content. Even knowing that there is some type of actual information encoded in a signal may not help, unless you are able to extrapolate a solution to the encoding method from the signal itself.

Then you have signals with multiple types of information layered in it, like the older analog TV signals. There were separate carrier frequencies for video and audio, and additional frequencies used for some other information. For example, when I was stationed in Germany we could use our American TV sets to watch German TV broadcasts. However, if we wanted to also be able to listen to the German audio, which was on a different carrier intermediate frequency than American TV, you had to buy a circuit board and incorporate it into the audio stage of your receiver to modify the received signal into one that the American TV could use.

[SWBTATTReg]

4. And there are probably more ways to communicate that we ...

are still unaware of. Although we've made giant leaps in knowing far more about the universe over the last 100 years (and especially accelerating during the last 25 years), we don't know everything. Even here on Earth, we don't even know more than a tiny fraction of our own oceans (in the depths). We only been to the Moon several times and never physically to any other planets within our own solar system. Hubble gave us an opening to the universe never before seen, and it's been wonderful.

Although we knowledgeable about the physics of how things are constructed, we are still babes in the woods, still. Medicine, and the art of constructing tailor-made medicines and / or devices, we just begun on this path and have made some headway.

Point being, we just touched the surface, and probably really truly searched a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the universe, for any kind of communications (mostly electromagnetic in nature), and the limited amount of ground-based satellite dishes available for such searches are limited, and as a matter of fact, funded by others outside the government (one of the founders of Apple or Microsoft, I think is heavily involved). Other methods of communications have been discussed, perhaps optical and / or quantum entanglement, etc.

I dream of the day when we finally communicate (communications to/from other intelligences), are we that naïve to believe that we're the only ones? I sometimes wonder, however, w/ the way our government has been in the past whether or not if communications has happened (seem to go berserk w/ denying UFOs and the like, perhaps too much so, why?). Do we really know for sure if not? I don't necessarily trust some elements of our government (need to know basis and all of that garbage).

Perhaps it could be a good thing if the government is hiding this, look at the history of how some cultures, when meeting for the first time, destroyed or absorbed the other culture entirely. Look at our own history of exploration, the Indians in 1492, being discovered by Columbus, eventually being absorbed or destroyed, the Mayans by the Spanish, etc.

[Thyla]

6. Give it time and I'm sure we will find something...

Start in our own backyard first, I definitely believe that will be easier than scanning for signals but both are valid and should be funded more. It may not be intelligent life as we know it but it'd be huge.

I may never see it in my life and that's a shame.

[Kablooie]

7. Maybe we are the first.

Someone has to be.

[NNadir]

11. I often find myself saying to myself, that Fermi, he was no Bill Nye.

Now all I need is Bill Nye to explain (and possibly correct) concepts like the Fermi gas, the Fermi surface, the Fermi-Dirac statistics, the Fermion, the Fermi-Thomas Transport Co-ordinates, the Fermi level, and the Fermi Point... ...and I'll be all set.

[Shemp Howard]

14. I think I get your point.

I think I get your point. Kind of. Maybe.

Anyway, I see Bill Nye as an informed entertainer. Nothing more, and nothing less. He's not really a "scientist", despite his degrees. And I certainly wouldn't put him in the category of a giant like Fermi. So who alive today is in that category? Stephen Hawking, for sure. And maybe Sheldon Cooper .

Everyone else is just guessing (not that guessing is such a bad thing).

[GeorgeGist]

13. Maybe because they are ...

listening to us.

[TreasonousBastard]

15. The first problem is that this is not so much a paradox as a question...

Where are the alien civilizations? And that follows from the question-- "Are there alien civilizations?"

The Earth is assumed to be about 4.5 billion years old. That means it took about 4.5 billion years for it to see a population that can send a creature to the moon, or a satellite to the end of the solar system.

Our galaxy is presumed to go back to shortly after the Big Bang and may be around 10 billion years old. Knock off a few billion for initial instability and the galaxy is likely far less than twice the age of the Earth. And that doesn't even deal with alternative possible explanations of the galaxy's age.

So, if it takes us 4-5 billion years just to leave the planet, why should we assume other civilizations beat us to it?

This really isn't the realm of science. It is the realm of science fiction and fantasy-- where warp drives, dimensional travel, subspace communications, mental and energy species and other fantastic ideas exist.

I find the thought of us being a galactic cargo cult particularly engaging.

[Staph]

18. Have you ever heard of the song Vlad the Astrophysicist?

"One day, folk singer, Peter Mulvey had a conversation with Vlad, and this is their story.

"This is also our story -- the story of the universe, and of all of us in it. Peter Mulvey has been singing this song around the country and the world, with an audience (including YouTube) into the hundreds of thousands, including a TED stage and many hallowed concert halls and clubs.

"Vlad the Astrophysicist is a real person: Dr. Vladimir Chaloupka, physics professor at the University of Washington. Peter Mulvey met him at the National Youth Science Camp in Bartow, West Virginia, where he has been playing every summer for sixteen years.

"Over a beer, Peter really did ask Vlad, ‘Are there intelligent civilizations out there other than ours, and if so why haven't they contacted us?’

"Vlad really did answer, and Peter’s whole world-view was altered in that moment."


http://lyrics.wikia.com/wiki/Peter_Mulvey:Vlad_The_Astrophysicist

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

21. Thank you for posting that.

Time is too long, space is too large. That sums it up perfectly.

There is a to my mind strange assumption that a technological civilization will last forever, or at least for many millions of years. That flies in the face of what we already know about evolution. I am never suggesting that a technological civilization will necessarily destroy itself before it is able to attain interstellar travel, rather that both interstellar travel is so incredible difficult and the life span of a species is so short that they may never be able to spread beyond their own solar system.

Maybe closer to the center of the galaxy, where stars are a whole lot closer together, can interstellar travel take place on a meaningful scale. But those aliens would have zero interest in exploring our edge of the galaxy. Why bother? They'd have plenty to keep them occupied within a hundred or so light years of their own home planet. We're a good 50,000 light years away. Keep in mind that faster than light travel will probably never be possible, so planning a journey of at least 50,000 years (and that's assuming you can achieve 99.99% of c) makes no sense.

We, at the edge of our galaxy, look into the vastness, wonder if we are alone, and make feeble attempts to contact others. But they probably aren't there. Or at least not contemporaneous with us.

[Lint Head]

19. I postulate that it could "possibly" be sound frequencies below

20 Hz and above 20,000 Hz. Which would be above and below the range of human hearing. Even radio waves down to the microwave frequencies of 1 Hertz and above 300 Hertz that communication could be possible between Interstellar beings.

Has it now been proven that basically everything vibrates at a particular frequency. Though the very slowest things in existence such as the movement of the earth which can be felt or an earthquake. Also the movement of a growing plant creates a movement though infinitesimal. Any movement would create a wave in the air though extremely slow that has the potential to be heard by instruments that have maybe not been invented as of yet.

I know that there is no such thing as silence. At least not complete silence. But only silence that we perceive as silence. I've also heard or read that a sound created actually never really stops. That it continues on into space in one form of the other. Such as television broadcasts, radio broadcast and even electromagnetic fields created by wires and cables. It does sound preposterous but I know these theories have been postulated previously and considering for every action there is a reaction it would seem to be true on some level.

If these vibrations could be detected by us and possibly a civilization more advanced we could eventually catch up with each other. But the fact that if there is life on other planets that that life could have come into existence evolved and died off before any such signal can reach that vast expanse of space. I love to think about these things though I could never actually comprehend them.

[SpankMe]

22. They shut us down when they saw Trump

My theory is that when a distant civilization intercepted an early episode of The Apprentice, they shut off all their listening equipment when they saw Trump.

We're truly alone, now!

[tclambert]

23. Tight beam communications, like lasers or masers, are more efficient. Broadcast is wasteful.

If you aren't in line with the intended target, tight beam communications would be hard to detect. Since everything is space is moving, you won't be in line for very long.

Broadcast TV and radio signals like we used to emit dissipate quickly (inverse square law). A civilization broadcasting like we did in the 20th century would be undetectable to us if they were more than 100 light-years away.

[brush]

27. That doesn't seem to me to be a paradox at all considering the vastness and distances of space.

It just hasn't happened yet in the 70 years we've been listening from our relatively pin-point-sized

planet existing on an outer arm of a relatively small galaxy floating in an ocean of space a billion-fold

the size of our own Pacific.

Needle in a haystack doesn't even come close to the chances of our technological development

synching up with and recognizing communication from that of another civilization light years away.

The chance of it happening is remote but the chance that no other life forms exists out there on the

millions, maybe even billions or trillions of other planets out there is even more remote.

When we look at photos from the moon and Mars we see their surfaces are just dirt and rocks like here on earth. There is even evidence that there is or was water on Mars at one time.

If it happened here it has happened somewhere else.

[FuzzyRabbit]

28. Why would intelligent life want to contact us?

Look at what we do. We foul our own nest and are attempting to destroy all life on our planet. Why would an intelligent life form want anything to do with us?

[benld74]

33. Most likely either they have or they are

We may not be smart enough to either understand or know that they have

Sort of like a Dem explaining things to a Trumpeteer,,,, they never seem to get it

[marble falls]

34. Maybe they're out there but we scare the bejeebers out of them?

[magicarpet]

35. They listened to one of tr-dump's rally speeches..

... and said oh no.... Don't even bother to contact them - they are too dirt stupid if they selected this clown as their leader.

They need at least another 10,000 to evolve to be considered what we think of as intelligent, knowledgeable, and learned and worthy of contact.

[longship]

37. Drumpf's rally speeches will not have gotten to the nearest star yet.

Remember, it's 4.25 light-years away. And that's just the closest star.

[world wide wally]

36. The sheer size of the Universe makes it very difficult to receive signals from other civilizations.

The nearest star is 4 light years away from us. The furthest is about 25 trillion, so picking up a signal is like a needle in a haystack.

[bleedinglib]

38. ONE MAJOR PROBLEM ??

It requires lots of $$$$$$$$$ to fund these projects & the current science deniers in Washington that are descended from monkies will only fund war's & kat houses !!

[raging moderate]

39. DU Rec.